Ten years ago the media were full of alarming stories about the number of Americans who did not have health care insurance. That "crisis" was used to whip up support for the Clinton administration's comprehensive health care plan, which would have essentially nationalized the $1 trillion health-care industry. The plan was defeated in Congress. A decade later, however, it seems that nothing was learned. The federal government, along with the states, has continued to expand the regulations and subsidies that created the problems in the first place. And once again the number of people without insurance is on the public agenda. On November 19, the National Academy of Sciences released a report claiming: "The American health care system is confronting a crisis. The cost of private health insurance is increasing at an annual rate of 12 percent. Individuals are paying more out of pocket and receiving fewer benefits. One in seven Americans is uninsured, and the number of uninsured is on the rise." Many newspapers followed up with stories of individuals losing benefits. The health insurance "crisis," like other problems of the health care industry, is the product of government interventions in the market. Tax policies still push most people into employer-based health plans, so that losing a job means losing coverage—a matter of renewed anxiety with the economic downturn. Price controls on insurers—and doctors, hospitals, and drug companies—are lowering the quality of service available to consumers. The cost of malpractice insurance, driven up by courts that have allowed outlandish awards to plaintiffs, are driving doctors out of business. States continue to increase the number of conditions that insurers must cover, driving up the cost of insurance. Over the last half century, layer upon layer of government interventions have so distorted the health-care industry that it can hardly be called a marketplace any longer.
As human beings, we fear chaos and confusion and fight against them. We appreciate order. We celebrate reason, logic, and science because...
The structure of our federal system can be explained in major part by the final two provisions of our Bill of Rights, the Ninth and Tenth
All of her heroes grew from Cyrus, the hero of that children's story she loved about the British soldier in India [The Mysterious Valley]...
Following each massacre in Israel, whether of soldiers, pregnant women, or children on their way to school, Arab leaders and their spokespersons appear in the media and insist that the way to end the violence is to end the occupation. Moreover, they argue, the occupation is the cause of the war in the Middle East and of world terrorism—Arab terrorists blow themselves up and murder others because they are frustrated victims of occupation. In their public relations campaign, however, the questions that the Arab leaders skillfully deflect are the following: If occupation leads to so many horrific consequences—war, suicide murders, and the condemnation of the world—why does Israel occupy the land? If the answer to all the problems in the Middle East is indeed the occupation, why does Israel not leave the contested territories, or, better yet, why did Israel go into the territories in the first place?
CNN’s Lou Dobbs has come in for criticism for saying something sensible and insightful. It is too vague and too politically correct to call
Why do they hate us? How could they have done this? What were they trying to achieve?
The April 26th shooting death of sixteen people at an overseas high school occurred in a country known for its strict gun-control laws. The tragedy is another reminder of the paralyzing uselessness of such controls and the mindset that seeds them. Fighting the darkest amongst us by infringing on the liberties of the brightest is an ignorant, and frankly scary, response to violence. Germany’s gun laws might be a model for admiration by control advocates, were it not for the fact that the laws hinder only honest gun users. A gun license application in Germany requires more than a background check. An applicant must prove his need for, and trustworthiness with, the piece—in addition to enduring a waiting period. The process places the honest, responsible citizen under a criminal lamplight, which still fails to detect some criminal intentions (including Friday’s attack). While the screening frustrates many sportsmen and would-be self-defenders into reconsidering their plans, criminals easily bypass the process via the hassle-free black market.
As reported to Edward L. Hudgins: Dear President George W. Bush and Senator Edward Kennedy, My teacher in social studies told us to write
As the United States pursues its war in Afghanistan, the national and the international press have focused attention on the civilian
What President Bush has called the first war of the twenty-first century has much in common with the great wars of the century just past...
Two millennia before the World Trade Center soared over the New York skyline, another creation of commerce served the same purpose of peace
The terrorist attacks of September 11 showed us good and evil, heroism and villainy. There were people who stared death in the face and, set
When articles are written about Ayn Rand's influence, almost invariably they mention Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.
July/August 2001 -- Students at Harvard and activists throughout the country have been fighting lately for a so-called "living wage" of
BOOK REVIEW: Mean Genes: From Sex to Money to Food, Taming Our Primal Instincts. By Terry Burnham and Jay Phelan. (New York: Perseus Book
Awakening on the morning of September 11, 2001, we Americans were proud, happy, and confident. We knew ourselves to be the only Superpower—
Most of us still find it impossible to grasp the destruction of the World Trade Center. It was real, we saw it, but it does not belong in...
John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, which was published thirty years ago, has been the most influential work of political philosophy in the
Ten years ago the media were full of alarming stories about the number of Americans who did not have health care insurance. That "crisis" was used to whip up support for the Clinton administration's comprehensive health care plan, which would have essentially nationalized the $1 trillion health-care industry. The plan was defeated in Congress. A decade later, however, it seems that nothing was learned. The federal government, along with the states, has continued to expand the regulations and subsidies that created the problems in the first place. And once again the number of people without insurance is on the public agenda. On November 19, the National Academy of Sciences released a report claiming: "The American health care system is confronting a crisis. The cost of private health insurance is increasing at an annual rate of 12 percent. Individuals are paying more out of pocket and receiving fewer benefits. One in seven Americans is uninsured, and the number of uninsured is on the rise." Many newspapers followed up with stories of individuals losing benefits. The health insurance "crisis," like other problems of the health care industry, is the product of government interventions in the market. Tax policies still push most people into employer-based health plans, so that losing a job means losing coverage—a matter of renewed anxiety with the economic downturn. Price controls on insurers—and doctors, hospitals, and drug companies—are lowering the quality of service available to consumers. The cost of malpractice insurance, driven up by courts that have allowed outlandish awards to plaintiffs, are driving doctors out of business. States continue to increase the number of conditions that insurers must cover, driving up the cost of insurance. Over the last half century, layer upon layer of government interventions have so distorted the health-care industry that it can hardly be called a marketplace any longer.
As human beings, we fear chaos and confusion and fight against them. We appreciate order. We celebrate reason, logic, and science because...
The structure of our federal system can be explained in major part by the final two provisions of our Bill of Rights, the Ninth and Tenth
All of her heroes grew from Cyrus, the hero of that children's story she loved about the British soldier in India [The Mysterious Valley]...
Following each massacre in Israel, whether of soldiers, pregnant women, or children on their way to school, Arab leaders and their spokespersons appear in the media and insist that the way to end the violence is to end the occupation. Moreover, they argue, the occupation is the cause of the war in the Middle East and of world terrorism—Arab terrorists blow themselves up and murder others because they are frustrated victims of occupation. In their public relations campaign, however, the questions that the Arab leaders skillfully deflect are the following: If occupation leads to so many horrific consequences—war, suicide murders, and the condemnation of the world—why does Israel occupy the land? If the answer to all the problems in the Middle East is indeed the occupation, why does Israel not leave the contested territories, or, better yet, why did Israel go into the territories in the first place?
CNN’s Lou Dobbs has come in for criticism for saying something sensible and insightful. It is too vague and too politically correct to call
Why do they hate us? How could they have done this? What were they trying to achieve?
The April 26th shooting death of sixteen people at an overseas high school occurred in a country known for its strict gun-control laws. The tragedy is another reminder of the paralyzing uselessness of such controls and the mindset that seeds them. Fighting the darkest amongst us by infringing on the liberties of the brightest is an ignorant, and frankly scary, response to violence. Germany’s gun laws might be a model for admiration by control advocates, were it not for the fact that the laws hinder only honest gun users. A gun license application in Germany requires more than a background check. An applicant must prove his need for, and trustworthiness with, the piece—in addition to enduring a waiting period. The process places the honest, responsible citizen under a criminal lamplight, which still fails to detect some criminal intentions (including Friday’s attack). While the screening frustrates many sportsmen and would-be self-defenders into reconsidering their plans, criminals easily bypass the process via the hassle-free black market.
The April 26th shooting death of sixteen people at an overseas high school occurred in a country known for its strict gun-control laws. The tragedy is another reminder of the paralyzing uselessness of such controls and the mindset that seeds them. Fighting the darkest amongst us by infringing on the liberties of the brightest is an ignorant, and frankly scary, response to violence. Germany’s gun laws might be a model for admiration by control advocates, were it not for the fact that the laws hinder only honest gun users. A gun license application in Germany requires more than a background check. An applicant must prove his need for, and trustworthiness with, the piece—in addition to enduring a waiting period. The process places the honest, responsible citizen under a criminal lamplight, which still fails to detect some criminal intentions (including Friday’s attack). While the screening frustrates many sportsmen and would-be self-defenders into reconsidering their plans, criminals easily bypass the process via the hassle-free black market.
As reported to Edward L. Hudgins: Dear President George W. Bush and Senator Edward Kennedy, My teacher in social studies told us to write
As the United States pursues its war in Afghanistan, the national and the international press have focused attention on the civilian
What President Bush has called the first war of the twenty-first century has much in common with the great wars of the century just past...
Two millennia before the World Trade Center soared over the New York skyline, another creation of commerce served the same purpose of peace
The terrorist attacks of September 11 showed us good and evil, heroism and villainy. There were people who stared death in the face and, set
When articles are written about Ayn Rand's influence, almost invariably they mention Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.
July/August 2001 -- Students at Harvard and activists throughout the country have been fighting lately for a so-called "living wage" of
BOOK REVIEW: Mean Genes: From Sex to Money to Food, Taming Our Primal Instincts. By Terry Burnham and Jay Phelan. (New York: Perseus Book
Awakening on the morning of September 11, 2001, we Americans were proud, happy, and confident. We knew ourselves to be the only Superpower—
Most of us still find it impossible to grasp the destruction of the World Trade Center. It was real, we saw it, but it does not belong in...
John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, which was published thirty years ago, has been the most influential work of political philosophy in the